How Heiko started their logo design journey

Summary

We need a logo for our company "tickfarm"which will be offering a bunch of different web appliactions for small and medium sized businesses.

A logo for our first web application "skillticks" is also needed. It is not part of the contest, but you should demonstrate that the main logo theme can be reused or somehow referenced in other logos, for example in the "skillticks" logo.

Company name

tickfarm.com

What inspires you and how do you envision the design for your business?

Tickfarm builds and offers easy to use web-based products as a hosted software service. We're aiming at businesses with between 5 and 500 employees - our goal is to provide simple and elegant solutions to issues and process inefficiencies common to small and medium businesses. The tickfarm is the place where we build and breed our nice little 'tick' appliactions.

Some tickfarm applications would be:

skillticks,

careerticks,

meeticks,

planticks... etc - you got the point.

NB The name is *not* derived from the blood-sucking nasty ticks ;-) but rather from the ticks you make when you tick something off your list...

We need a main logo and logos for the web-based products we'll be offering. Naturally, the designer of the successful main corporate logo will have a head start when it comes to designing the subsequent webapp logos.

From the skillticks product description:

We're all exited to announce skillticks, the first tickfarm service offering.

If
your team is in the professional services or consulting business,
chances are you already create and distribute professional skill
profiles for yourself and your team members. A skill profile is the
first impression a potential customer gets of you or your team members
- and we all know you never get a second chance to make a first
impression. And probably, you have already encountered some issues with
skill profiles. Are the skill profiles of all your team members up to
date when a potential customer calls? Do you have access to them when
you need them? Are the skills and categories used to group them
consistent or does everybody use their own system? Do you use
centralized project descriptions or does everybody have to make up
their own?

With skillticks, you can tick the creation and
distribution of your professional skill profiles off your list and
don't worry about those issues again.

Wants

- name and logo/icon should be usable in conjunction or standing alone
- we'd like to see an 'icon' part and a text part.
- since it is designed for the web, the logo should be transformable to a favicon and still be recognizable
- you *can* use a tick in the logo but you don't have to.
- clean
- web2.0ish (I'm not sure myself what that means)
- please use all lowercase for text

Don't want

- no pastel colors or palette
- please do not use old-school fonts with serifs
- no blood-sucking ticks ;-)
- we're not a 37signals rip-off and the logo shouldn't be, either ;-)
- we decided we don't want designs which *only* have a tick integrated into the text. we'd like to see an 'icon' part of the logo as well as a text part.
- we don't like to see ".com" integrated into the logo/text. it could later be added but should not be part of the main logo.